'Grey's Anatomy' recap: Oh Henry!

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If you came here looking for an uplifting hour… this is not your episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.” We pick up just a few moments after where we left off last week — Teddy has gotten Henry to the hospital bed and a CT reveals some big horrible tumor in his lung. Teddy gets called into an emergency surgery herself on another patient so she can’t be there at Henry’s side through everything.

She instead has to operate on a woman Callie just released from the hospital after a spine fusion — she collapses, and they can’t figure out what’s wrong until, in surgery, they find a screw from her spine that has come loose and ripped up part of her heart. Callie is completely freaked out and only admits to Bailey the depth of why she is so scared, which is that she let Jackson do the surgery himself while she read a magazine. Judging by the other attendings this seems to be the standard, but regardless she knows she could be held responsible. But as of the close of the episode, it’s not clear if the woman is going to survive or not.

Richard does discuss Henry’s treatment with Teddy and he wants to open him up to pull out the lung, take out the tumor, and put the rest of the healthy lung back in. Teddy thinks this is far too invasive and wants him to use a laser, but he’s never done the procedure with a laser and is adamant that his first go at it not be on his colleague’s wife. Teddy knows that Cristina can do it since she just did an identical surgery, but Owen (and Bailey and Richard) all argue that it’s too much to put on her shoulders. Teddy thinks that they can just cover Henry’s face and not tell Cristina his name and that she won’t figure out who it is, and her ability to just be a surgical machine will then work to everyone’s advantage.

Owen finally reluctantly agrees, and away they go. Unfortunately, as the surgery goes on things start to go wrong and they have to open up his chest anyway; once inside they find that the tumor has eaten through his pulmonary artery and there is no hope for him. Despite Richard’s best efforts to keep his heart pumping, he dies on the table. Cristina finally realizes that everyone is acting a little bit strangely and Owen, who has come in to see how things are going, calls her into the scrub room and tells her that it was Henry. We don’t hear her reaction because she’s on the other side of the window, but basically — it’s horrible and she completely melts down to learn that her mentor’s husband just died on her watch.

Owen’s heartbreaking duties aren’t over because he has to tell Teddy, but Teddy is wrist-deep in her own patient and is the only one who can really finish the job. Richard convinces Owen that whether he likes it or not, he has to keep the news about Henry from her long enough for her to finish the surgery so that they don’t have another patient die on the table in front of them. He’s still pretty tortured but the fact that all are wearing surgical masks helps, and he manages to smile and nod along with Teddy’s conversation well enough that she truly thinks Henry is hanging out in recovery somewhere, and the episode ends before we see him finally tell her the awful news.

The day isn’t going much better for Derek and Meredith, though at least they are both alive (for now). Meredith gets a call from Janet saying that the court cancelled the hearing and that the way it happens basically means that they are not going to give Zola to them. She actually tells Meredith it’s time to move on, so this doesn’t really leave a ton of room for misinterpretation. She’s heartbroken and when she talks to Derek about it, declares that she doesn’t want another baby.

She’s then called away with Alex to go pick up a newborn that was born unexpectedly in a facility not at all set up for all of the complications she appears to have. When they go to take her away in her incubator they run into her mom, who is predictably distressed. The doctor insists that she can’t go along since she just had surgery herself and it would be too much, so Meredith goes to her and promises that she will take care of her baby. Naturally, this means that something is going to go wrong, and that something is that their ambulance breaks down at night (of course), in the pouring rain (of course), on a curvy mountain road with no shoulder, just around a bend so no driver will see them until it’s too late (of COURSE). Oh, and the ambulance is filled with oxygen tanks so if they DO get hit, it will blow sky-high.

The driver runs to go get help and they manage to call Arizona, who is doing a surgery with Derek and Mark, to tell her what happened. While she has them on speaker phone, they hear a loud noise and then the phone goes dead. What we see is that they get hit by a car and roll over. Alex and Mere seem to be okay (though she has a nasty gash on her forehead) but she decides that they have to get out with the baby. When they finally open the doors and go outside, they see that the road is now littered with bodies and an overturned truck that that is on fire, and we are left with some cliffhangers for at least the next few weeks.